James Woodard spent 27 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. He was released last week as a result of DNA evidence gathered through an unprecedented cooperative effort between Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, a Democrat and the first black DA in the history of Texas, and the Texas Innocence Project. Together they re-examined hundreds of cases and have freed 17 Texas inmates so far — their effort still has 250 more cases to review. Last year NPR’s Morning Edition...

I came across a Sarah Posner interview with Black religion expert Jonathan Walton in Salon the other day and it has stuck with me since. In it Walton explains how King used direct nonviolent confrontation as a means to reconciliation: King believed in nonviolent, direct confrontation. And thus when we come marching through the town, we are trying to expose inequality and expose violence. And if you practice nonviolent confrontation, you morally shame your opponent toward moral suasion. And when you...

1 day and 320,525 views means something… Via John Aravosis who reminds us that it was just one year ago that the infamous Hillary 1984 YouTube ad took the Internet by storm.

By brian @ Shoebox blog via Duncan @ The Last Minute

On Wednesday delegates at the United Methodist Church’s General Conference voted that marriage should not include same-sex unions and that homosexual acts are not compatible with Christian teaching. Not a surprise, the votes: Approved, 517-416, keeping the statement that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching. Rejected, 574-298, a measure that would have changed the church’s definition of marriage to include same-sex unions. Approved, 544-365, a resolution...

Howard Dean was on The Daily Show last night. The interview was all smiles and laughs but chock-a-block full of important and substantive information. It went on for an unusually long 9 minutes and ran right up into the commercial break. Stewart commented on Jeremiah Wright on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday’s shows and — in contrast to every other cable news show — his clear and conclusive emphasis was on how miffed with the media he was because “this issue which should have...

It’s been kind of a geeky day for me so I thought it appropriate that I close it out with this one… You really can design serious games for positive social change. And there’s a non-profit that’s all about helping folks do that. It’s Games for Change. Cory Doctorow quotes Eleanor on G4C: Games for Change, the non-profit devoted to promoting, well, games for change, will hold their fifth annual festival in New York City from June 2-4. Keynote speakers are Henry Jenkins...

Wolcott’s got a When Democrats go Post-al look at the lefty blogosphere up at Vanity Fair that’s getting lots of attention and is generally none-too-flattering. Then today Jeff Jarvis asks, What is Kos? I’m thinking that Daily Kos is not — as it wants to be and is often painted — netroots, the voice of a popular movement. No, it’s more like Tammany Hall, a would-be powerbroker and kingmaker. And Kos is the would-be party boss. Notice I say would-be. Remember too: a couple weeks...

Author and educator Clay Shirky (his latest masterpiece is Here Comes Everybody) spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week on the “cognitive surplus” and how we’ll put it to use. Fascinating: I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like...

Kevin Drum reviews the schedule for the stimulus checks. It’s based on the last two digits of your Social Security number. He also dug up the online calculator to help you figure out the size of your check. You really don’t need a calculator… you get $600/person or $1200/couple unless you make either very little money or lots’o'money.  None if you owe back taxes. Economists have pretty much unanimously concluded it will have only a modest impact. We’ll be buying gas...

Maybe yes, maybe no, but lately Birmingham, AL, has come under the microscope because ABC News 20/20 chose to do a sensationalist hidden-camera ratings-grabber of a story ostensibly to find out. Since that time it has been ricocheting around the blogosphere and again today this popped into my RSS reader: On Friday, ABC’s 20/20 tackled a palpable double-standard facing same-sex couples who are affectionate in public. [...]

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show did a segment last night on a 60 Minutes interview with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I went back to watch the full 2-part profile by Lesley Stahl and found it to be an outstanding piece of television journalism. Stewart made fun of Scalia on two points.

Said Stewart after having his good fun, “Let me tell you something, Jeremiah Wright is not the one running for president. He’s the guy who used to talk at the church of one of the guys who is running…” Stewart’s guest tonight will be Newt Gingrich, who was on both “Good Morning America” and “The View” today presenting pro-Hillary talking points. How much do you want to bet that Stewart doesn’t let Newt get away with that tonight?

PBS is running a 10-hour documentary mini-series, Carrier, about life aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Episode 3, Super Secrets,  which aired Friday and is being released online today, includes interviews with gay and lesbian servicemembers. One of them, quartermaster third class petty officer Brian Downey who served in the navigation department of the Nimitz, was interviewed by Andy Towle: How do you feel about the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in general? In this...

It’s worth noting that today — the day on which the Reverend Jeremiah Wright soaked up so much of the media spotlight — was the day that several southern states (including Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia) observed Confederate Memorial Day. Some of us wonder why. Matthew Yglesias: It seems that April is Confederate Heritage month. Why one would want to celebrate a heritage of violent rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate a system of chattel...

The Austin American-Statesman is reporting a white secret service agent has been placed on leave after an African American employee reported finding a noose hanging at the service’s main training facility outside Washington D.C. Making matters worse: The alleged incident happened as U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson is expected to decide next month whether to sanction the service for failing to turn over evidence in a long-running lawsuit alleging that the service created a racially hostile...

Yet another study finds Democrats and Republicans going to our separate media corners. This one from University of Georgia associate professor of journalism Barry Hollander as reported by the AJC’s Political Insider: What he documented was a quiet stampede. In 1998, 27 percent of Republicans and 25 percent of Democrats tuned in regularly to Atlanta-based CNN. Eight years later, the number of Democrats had risen to 29 percent. But the number of Republicans who tuned in to CNN had shrunk to 19...

In New York Magazine this week, Sean McManus finds that the fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church: …some atheists are taking seriously the idea that atheism needs to stand for things, like evolution and ethics, not just against things, like God. The most successful movements in history, after all—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.—all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals, money, clerics, and some version of...

Last week it emerged that one of Norman Mailer’s mistresses, former actress and model Carole Mallory, sold her personal papers to Harvard’s Houghton Library. On Friday they gave the UK’s Times OnLine an exclusive preview. Harvard? Why Harvard? Leslie Morris, the Harvard library’s curator, said the main reason the university had been interested in so seemingly unacademic an archive was that Mailer’s hand-written amendments appeared on several manuscripts. “The edits to me were...